Defining Poverty Up

The census workers have been around, and any day now they’ll predictably estimate that despite rising incomes overall, about one eighth of Americans still somehow live in poverty.

This will begin a great wave of public outcry, fed by mainstream media, culminating in progressive politicians of every branch and level of government making impassioned speeches about America’s need to double down on social welfare spending.

Hopefully someone will point out that despite ever increasing entitlement spending, the poverty rate has remained basically unchanged for the last 40 years.

It’s a bit like a ballet…or roller derby.

You've got the modern liberty movement for whom big government policies and entitlement spending are anathema; facing off against the radical progressive coalition of the left, which seeks transformation of ours into a system of Democratic Socialism.

Add to that a tough mid term re-election cycle for Democrats in November, and that congress must act to reauthorize the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant by September 30th, or risk a lapse in funding; and things are fixing to get ugly in Washington.

Of course one of the difficulties in combating poverty in this nation is the lack of an objective definition. Government attempted to define it during the Johnson administration, when the “War on Poverty” was announced as part of the failed experiment that was The Great Society. An analyst at the Social Security Administration took the Agriculture Department's cost estimate for a basic diet and multiplied it by three, and that figure has been adjusted annually for inflation to arrive at the federal poverty guideline; in 2008 it was $21,834 for a family of four with two minor children.

By that measure, despite steadily increasing entitlement spending, the official poverty rate hasn’t gone down since its introduction. In 1969 is was 12.1%, and in 2007 in was 12.5%. If entitlement spending enabled class mobility you could expect that income disparity would decrease over time as people improved their situations, instead it has grown.

The figure is also misleading in that the federal poverty guidelines only count pre-tax cash income, while ignoring other forms of support. The American Enterprise Institute reports that spending by poor households from all sources is routinely double their reported income. The average person living below the poverty in America lives in a home 30% larger than that of the average middle class European, and the odds are that in that home they have a color television with cable or satellite and a DVD player. Most have air conditioning, and at least one automobile parked in the drive. The idea that the poor have not benefited from the overall increase in the U.S. standard of living is a lie.

Please take note that from 1989 to 2007, about three-quarters of the increase in the poverty population occurred among Hispanics -- mostly immigrants and their offspring, while the poverty rate fell for blacks over the same period. But you won’t hear progressives talk about that, because it suggests that America doesn't have a poverty problem at all, but an immigration problem. Counting illegal immigrants in the census is artificially inflating the poverty rate, and it is a fact that tougher immigration laws could cause poverty rates to fall sharply.

But those pushing the left's Marxist agenda need poverty to stay high or even rise.

To that end the Obama administration has introduced a proposal for a "supplemental poverty measure" in 2011, that would tie the poverty threshold to what the poorest third of Americans spend on food, housing, clothes and utilities. This will produce a much higher poverty line than is currently in effect, and essentially installs a permanent poverty rate. Every Americans income could double overnight, but the poverty rates wouldn’t budge, government would just double welfare payments. It’s all a ploy to promote the administration’s policies of income redistribution by portraying poverty as stubbornly increasing. In 2008, the traditional poverty rate was 13.2 percent; under the new formula the rate might jump up to 17 percent.

That’s not poverty, that's low relative income. The administration is selling the idea that people are poor if they're a given distance from the top, even if all of their needs are met, they suffer some kind of psychological deprivation by being far outside the mainstream.

I'm not buying.